Meldodrama, Sensation, and Tragedy in Hardy's Novels, 1872-1895

This valuable discussion of melodrama, sensation novels, and tragedy in Hardy fiction originated as a personal response in the form of an e-mail to some questions I raised after quoting from a recent work of mystery fiction. In adding it to the Victorian Web with the author's permission I have made no changes other than dividing the e-missive into paragraphs and removing the opening "Dear George" and the closing "Philip." If anyone would like to join in the discussion, please do so, sending yourt comments to me at george at landow.com; replace "at" by "@." [GPL].

Your question regarding the coexistence of melodrama and tragedy is one
worthy of the Thomas Hardy Poem of the Month. The strict, theatrical meaning
of the term "melodrama," a suspenseful play using music at key moments to
heighten suspense and underscore the contrast between virtuous and evil
characters, only tentatively applies to your question about the lost letter
and the tragic fate of Tess. The common expectation of the working-class
melodramas of the Surrey side was that, since poverty equalled virtue and
wealth equalled vice, the poor but virtuous hero and heroine would always
triumph in the final scene, sometimes through the benevolent intervention of
Providence, as in The Rent Day.

The term "melodrama" in theatre is roughly
equivalent to "Sensation Novel" in fiction, so we might examine your
question in terms of the classic Sensation Novel East Lynne (1861) by the
obscure "Mrs. Henry Wood." In this highly "melodramatic" work, the hero wins
through, ultimately at the sacrifice of the heroine, with whom, nonetheless,
we do not consistently identify because of the questionable motivations
behind some of her behaviour.

Now, Tess's "purity" is undoubted (at least, by Hardy and his narrator) from
the title page, with its pertinent quotation from Hamlet: her name is
"wounded" because she lacks a Horatio to tell the world and its wife her
version of events and reveal that her motives (if not her conduct) were
always pure. After more twists and turns of plot than one finds in East
Lynne the pure heroine is destroyed by patristic society for the crime
of taking vengeance on her defiler; in fact, since she lives with Alec as
his wife, her conscience lulled by affluence for herself and financial
security for her family, she attacks Alec only when he threatens to prevent
her from joining the man she truly loves, the ethically-challenged Angel
(whose name, nevertheless, suggests he is the morally pure male lead of the
melodrama).

Hardy began his fiction-writing career as a Sensation novelist (Desperate
Remedies) and could never quite get over the predisposition to melodramatise events, if only to maintain
reader interest when such works as The Mayor of Casterbridge and The
Return of the Native were running in serial. But Michael Henchard and
Eustacia Vye are not the utterly pure protagonist that Hardy insists Tess
is, so that late Victorian readers probably accepted the justice of their
falls (especially that of the morally dubious Eustacia) and therefore did
not see those novels as tragedies. But Hardy, equating Hamlet and Tess from
the first, clearly sees Tess as utterly virtuous victim and therefore as a
tragic heroine. In other words, Hardy felt it legitimate to use melodramatic
-- well, Sensation Novel -- devices within a work that he knew all along was
tending towards the tragic, conventional expectations about the fate of the
virtuous heroine notwithstanding.